valries, exercises some sort of influence over its own destiny.
Feudalism was not, properly speaking, an aristocratic government, a
senate of kings--to use the language used by Cineas to Pyrrhus; it was a
collection of individual despotisms, exercised by isolated aristocrats,
each of whom, being sovereign in his own domains, had to give no account
to another, and asked nobody's opinion about his conduct towards his
subjects.

Is it astonishing that such a system incurred, on the part of the
peoples, more hatred than even those which had reduced them to a more
monotonous and more lasting servitude? There was despotism, just as in
pure monarchies, and there was privilege, just as in the very closest
aristocracies. And both obtruded themselves in the most offensive, and,
so to speak, crude form. Despotism was not tapered off by means of the
distant and elevation of a throne; and privilege did not veil itself
behind the majesty of a large body. Both were the appurtenances of an
individual ever present and ever alone, ever at his subjects' doors, and
never called upon, in dealing with their lot, to gather his peers around
him.

And now we will leave the subjects in the case of feudalism, and consider
the masters, the owners of fiefs, and their relations one with another.
We here behold quite a different spectacle; we see liberties, rights, and
guarantees, which not only give protection and honor to those who enjoy
them, but of which the tendency and effect are to open to the subject
population an outlet towards a better future.

It could not, in fact, be otherwise: for, on the one hand, feudal society
was not wanting in dignity and glory; and, on the other, the feudal
system did not, as the theocracy of Egypt or the despotism of Asia did,
condemn its subjects irretrievably to slavery. It oppressed them; but
they ended by having the power as well as the will to go free.

It is the fault of pure monarchy to set up power so high, and encompass
it with such splendor, that the possessor's head is turned, and that
those who are beneath it dare scarcely look upon it. The sovereign
thinks himself a god; and the people fall down and worship him. But it
was not so in society under owners of fiefs: the grandeur was neither
dazzling nor unapproachable; it was but a short step from vassal to
suzerain; they lived familiarly one with another, without any possibility
that superiority should think itself illimitable, or subordinati